How Donald Trump Is Like the KS Legislature
As if I was going to stay quiet about Trump hawking Bibles
Ever face a math problem too complicated to even tackle? Or a Wikipedia article, like on some chemical, with all the diagrams of ionic bonds, that you sought for elucidation, only to shake your head and just close the tab? Like, dude, you just wanted to know about bleach, and then everything got all…sciency.
No, wait, I’ve got it: you look up anything on the IRS website, and instead of trying to figure out which forms you need and what all the bureaucratese means, you just decide payday loans—or hell, tax fraud and prison—don’t sound so bad after all in comparison.
That’s sort of me with…God.
It’s not that I can’t follow the lingo or the logic, it’s that I can’t grasp the motivation to go through the whole dance, when I don’t hear the music. If there’s such a thing as a God gene, I must have been born without it, and Catholic baptism, Lutheran upbringing, Sunday school, Vacation Bible School, adult Catholic conversion—none of that managed to manufacture the missing Belief Circuitry that Would Enable Me to Get It.
As a result, I’m largely indifferent to the Godstuff. To me, it’s unanswerable. Why waste effort trying to prove or disprove the unprovable? Why try to yuck other people’s yums? I’d love to spend the rest of my days just tolerantly shrugging like this, content to be a—wait for it—a Meh-theist.
But there’s one small problem.
I fucking hate bullies and despoilers.
Bullies, of course, are a theme for me. Despoilers are are folks who ruin perfectly fine, even beautiful things just because they can, because they have the power. For all that some militant atheists rail against the totality of all religions, I can’t deny that religions have had a hand in producing some tremendous beauty, and I’m not just talking about art and architecture. I mean the deep peace and centeredness I’ve seen in some believers of many faith traditions. That’s beautiful.
So I think of these folks—people whose Godstuff gives them meaning and solace and strength to help them be brave and struggle through life—when I read about this installment’s “news hook”: the Trump Bible Sales for Christian Holy Week.
It’s not just that I’m second-hand or vicariously offended for my believing friends. We may live in a Christian hegemonic country, but there’s a part of me that feels for the unsung Christians out there trying to live peaceful, beautiful, yes, Christlike lives. To put it in a legible though vomitous parlance, their “brand” has been “stolen” pretty much all my life on this planet.
Church-State Separation as a Bulwark Against Weaponized Faith
Atheists with axes to grind against religions often—and rightly—fear the unquestioning nature of religious faith, its potential to draw together vehement hordes of True Believers animated by Absolute Conviction undeterred by worldly consequences because of a promise of the Life in the Hereafter, its tendency to scapegoat differences and literally Demonize opponents and convert at the point of a gun.
That’s the rationale behind the separation between church and state in the US system of government. Don’t ever believe anyone who tries to tell you that the founders were not deathly afraid of creating a nation vulnerable to the same kinds of inter-religious wars they’d seen tear Europe apart. Democracy is about the giving and scrutiny of reasons for decisions, and reasons that default to Godstuff, sooner or later, are useless (or dangerous) to scrutinize except for one’s personal curiosity or existential meaning. Allowing everyone the freedom to worship and believe as they wish, protecting everyone’s right to do this, keeping government out of religion and religion out of government—these are all means to tame religion’s tendency to become weaponized, to avoid Holy Wars. Such are notoriously absolutist in their destruction because they are hard to end with reasoned treaties and settlements built on negotiated compromises. Such things are anathema when GOD DEMANDS VICTORY WITHOUT QUARTER TO THE INFIDELS!
Of course, you don’t need masses of people organized into rigidly deployed cadres to weaponize religion. You can do it with just one parent and one child, as we’ve seen recently with, say, the Amazon documentary about the Duggar clan and their deeply toxic Christian homeschooling ideology though these sickos just had to mimeograph a whole ream of kids to fuck up.
Still, perversions (if such they are1) of religious ideas scale well, so the more who are gathered in the name of whatever whack doctrine some disgruntled power worshipper pulls out of his ass, the more dangerous they become, and if the religion communing with this sewage gets organized, that’s a force multiplier.
The Hypocrisy Twist
But then the militant atheists offer another critique of religion: that all these Bible (Talmud / Koran) thumpers are blatant hypocrites: they don’t practice what they preach. Sure, theocrats have handy rebuttal, as the Duggar case illustrates—“Like all of us, he sinned, and he asks forgiveness, to be prayed over and welcomed back into this loving and supporting community of believers so that he will not stumble again.” Neat how that works.
But what I want to point out is how these two atheist lines of attack on religion don’t work so well together. On the one hand, religion is dangerous because people really believe this craziness! On the other, these religious frauds don’t really believe any of this shit and are doing it just to manipulate people and accumulate money and power!
How to parse this? Should we fear legions of frothing True Believers Burning the Witch or the Heretic because they’re so drunk on the Kool-Aid of religion? Or should we mock them for their hypocrisy: “You’re so righteous? Then how come you’re a lying, horrible, child perving, E. Jean Carroll raping creepoid, huh?”
If the legions really believe, then they’re Christian Soldiers marching as to war against secularism, impurity, vice, naughtiness, kids who stay up 15 minutes past bedtime, you name it. They want to ban all wickedness by establishing a theocracy of Gilead. But if they’re all hypocrites boinking sex workers in cheap motels and paying for their mistresses’ abortions, then they’re not really True Believers. So which is it?
One answer is that they’re fascists: people who believe, deep down, that they are better than others, so they get to act inconsistently, arbitrarily, and owe no one any coherent explanation at all for their conduct, because they have, or hope to have, the power to behave with the impunity their God has promised them, even—or especially—within the theocracy they hope to instantiate.
I absolutely believe that this answer explains the deep psychology of a lot of folks who claim the mantle of Christianity, especially those entrenched in Christian Nationalism, the Seven Mountains Mandate, the New Apostolic Reformation, and various other labels: it’s Christian fascism.
But those are folks who, well, still go to church.
Photo by me
“Nones” On the Run
Back in 2015, the Pew Research Center released its Religious Landscape Study, the first update of that report in seven years. It was a goldmine of data into what American Godstuff looked like, and its biggest bombshell was the rise of the “Nones,” those Americans who cite no particular religious affiliation. They were more numerous that Catholics and Mainline Protestants and were giving Evangelical Protestants a run for their money. They’d shot up 52 percent, to almost 56 million Americans, in just seven years, growing from 16 percent of the population to over 22. Pew estimates across 2021-2023 put them at 29, 31, and 28 percent of the population. From 1 in every 6 people you might meet in 2007, to 1 in 3 by 2023. That’s huge.
Flash back to 2015 with me a moment: The Supreme Court upheld the ACA and same-sex marriage, and young people especially were burning out on organized religion, whose most famous spokesmen had, for a quarter-century or more, been blaming gays for natural disasters and insisting any collective generosity not directed toward their own coffers was socialism. This looked like pretty upbeat news for generational shifts away from intolerance and selfishness.
Unless you were either a True Believer or a would-be Christian Fascist. (Or, well, anyone else with the spiritual rot of fascist morality surging through your veins.) For those folks, this stuff looks like The End Times. Not only was POTUS a Black guy, but the kids were leaving church in droves and socialist Obamacare was now the law of the land thanks to those judicial activists!
Then we had a Presidential election.
Pew had documented the increasing popularity of calling oneself “evangelical” or “born-again” across the Christian spectrum, from Catholics to Orthodox to Mormons to Jehovah’s Witnesses, but it was still a bit of a whiplash to see Trump win something like 80 percent of white evangelicals. Twice. Much, much ink spilled trying to make sense of that, but it came down to the leaders negotiating deals with Trump and the base just clamoring for vengeance and cruelty, explained ex post facto with references to King Cyrus and a bunch of stuff that doesn’t matter.
What did matter was the clarified battle lines. We had the white evangelical True Believers (many of them Catholic integralist and really blatantly theocratic) falling increasingly into a Christian Nationalism movement (or network or ethos) and dragging some other true believers along. And we had a lot of politically—and often religiously—checked-out folks who accepted the label and identity “evangelical Christian” because it was part of the full Trumpian package that communicated their resentments and because they didn’t have to do anything else to claim that label. They didn’t have to go to church, be upright people, care about the poor, shelter the stranger, or any of that stuff, in large part because their presidential avatar didn’t have to, and no one was policing the label for him or them.
And who were the defenders, the folks on the other side? Mostly people who didn’t get what was going on. Democrats and a lot of Mainstream Christians have an aversion to conflict and an almost “battered intimate partner” habit of meeting their bad-faith abusers half-way, then half-way again, and again, and again. How much can I give to my enemy so he will stop being my enemy? Doesn’t Matthew 5:40 instruct us to give our accuser not just our shirt, but our coat as well? Surely then he’ll realize we’re really good people deep down and stop all this angry criticism. It’s like a lot of Christians forgot that evil exists, and Democrats forgot that Nazis exist.
As far as I can tell, only Peter Beinart basically warned us about this back when the buzz over the “Nones” was still high. In The Atlantic (which is now only worth a damn for Adam Serwer’s stuff) Beinart wrote:
Secularism is indeed correlated with greater tolerance of gay marriage and pot legalization. But it’s also making America’s partisan clashes more brutal. And it has contributed to the rise of both Donald Trump and the so-called alt-right movement, whose members see themselves as proponents of white nationalism. As Americans have left organized religion, they haven’t stopped viewing politics as a struggle between “us” and “them.” Many have come to define us and them in even more primal and irreconcilable ways.
… For decades, liberals have called the Christian right intolerant. When conservatives disengage from organized religion, however, they don’t become more tolerant. They become intolerant in different ways. Research shows that evangelicals who don’t regularly attend church are less hostile to gay people than those who do. But they’re more hostile to African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims. In 2008, the University of Iowa’s Benjamin Knoll noted that among Catholics, mainline Protestants, and born-again Protestants, the less you attended church, the more anti-immigration you were.
…How might religious nonattendance lead to intolerance? Although American churches are heavily segregated, it’s possible that the modest level of integration they provide promotes cross-racial bonds. In their book, Religion and Politics in the United States, Kenneth D. Wald and Allison Calhoun-Brown reference a different theory: that the most-committed members of a church are more likely than those who are casually involved to let its message of universal love erode their prejudices.
Whatever the reason, when cultural conservatives disengage from organized religion, they tend to redraw the boundaries of identity, de-emphasizing morality and religion and emphasizing race and nation. Trump is both a beneficiary and a driver of that shift.
…Maybe it’s the values of hierarchy, authority, and tradition that churches instill. Maybe religion builds habits and networks that help people better weather national traumas, and thus retain their faith that the system works. For whatever reason, secularization isn’t easing political conflict. It’s making American politics even more convulsive and zero-sum.
And it got worse. As Christianity Today’s Daniel Silliman noted last October (emphases mine),
Donald Trump’s presidency accelerated the decline of church attendance in America. While the number of people going to church was already going down steadily, data from Harvard University’s Cooperative Election Study shows an “exogeneous shock” in 2016, according to political scientist Ryan Burge, who specializes in the study of religious data.
“For every action there is a reaction,” Burge told CT. “Donald Trump is the action. His election caused all these ripple effects in American society, and you can see it in the pews.”
Politically moderate and left-leaning evangelicals appear most impacted. A growing number seem to have felt estranged from their congregations in the Trump era. The rate of self-identified Democrats giving up on church in their 20s–50s doubled from the end of Barack Obama’s presidency to the end of Trump’s, according to Burge. And the dramatic change came in 2016. At the same time, more Republicans started identifying as evangelical but not attending any worship services.
The growing consensus of social scientists is that political identities are currently much, much stronger than religious commitments.
The incredibly underappreciated Amanda Marcotte of Salon gets at this directly in the context of Trump and his Patriotic Bibles. Here’s her best stuff:
…it's time to consider the strong possibility that Trump's disdain towards the practice and theological beliefs of Christianity is not a surprise to his followers. It's likely a selling point that Trump's version of "Christianity" is void of faith and morality. His pitch to his followers has a certain appeal: They can have the identity "Christian," and all the power that goes with it, minus the parts they don't like. No boring church services or Bible study. No tedious talk about "compassion" and "grace," which only gets in the way of the gay-bashing and racism. And definitely no need to worry about that Jesus guy, with all his notions about "loving thy neighbor" and "welcoming the stranger."
Their new lord is Trump himself. He's a lot more fun for the redhats since his message is "kick thy neighbor" and "build the wall." Frankly, I'm sure most of them find it a huge relief, not having to pretend they ever cared about that peace-and-charity crap.
…The teachings of Jesus Christ were always a poor fit for Republicans. They're just way more into decimating Social Security than they are into loaves and fishes. What Trump offers when it comes to Christianity is what he offers his followers in every other aspect: permission to stop pretending to be good people. His gift to them is his shamelessness. Through Trump, his followers can realize their fantasies of being unapologetic bullies. This is the same schtick as MAGA members who claim to be "patriots" while attacking the rule of law and democracy. Trump tells them what they want to hear: You can be a Christian without compassion.
Even before Trump's version of a "Bible" was being sold, his hollowed-out version of "faith" had cannibalized what was left of evangelical Christianity, which had already spent decades remaking itself as the culture war arm of the GOP. This is most easily tracked in the rise of churchless Christians. Over 40% of self-described evangelicals go to church once a year or less. Instead, as the New York Times reported, MAGA is basically their religion. Instead of prayer and Bible study, they "practice" their faith by watching Christian-branded online content that is, in actuality, just about right-wing politics.
But, even that number underplays how much Trumpism has displaced traditional theology in evangelical religion. In my report on the online Christian right, former evangelical minister Brad Onishi argued that churches themselves learned they must wholly embrace the views and rhetoric of the MAGA movement if they wish to keep their parishioners. For instance, the "churches that refused to shut down during COVID" are "booming," swelling from "from 100 people to 1000 people," while churches that behaved more responsibly often found themselves shutting down. "I do think it's making it more extreme. If you're not willing to go there as a pastor, you may lose your church," Onishi told Salon.
Replacing the real Bible with Trump Bibles is a too-perfect symbol of what has happened to evangelical Christianity. The mistake is in believing Trump's followers are confused or ashamed about their devotion to a godless creep who laughs at true believers. In Trump's hands, the Bible is not a text for prayer and reflection, it's just a weapon. It's much easier to beat people down with a book if it's closed.
Christianity Today’s editor Russell Moore penned a piece entitled “Why Character Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” and it’s straight-up, old-fashioned, stuffy Christianity. He starts with the image of The Simpsons’ character Ned Flanders, an uptight caricature of Godly prudery, and argues that the animated dude is just plain archaic in not just the secular world today, but among old-school self-described evangelicals.
…part of the vulgarization of the Right is due to the Barstool Sports / Joe Rogan secularization of the base, in which Kid Rock is an avatar more than Lee Greenwood [bad choice of examples: he’s Trump’s partner on the Bible selling grift] or Michael W. Smith. But much more alarmingly, the coarsening and character-debasing is happening among politicized professing Christians. The member of Congress joking at a prayer breakfast about turning her fiancé down for sex to get there was there to talk about her faith and the importance of religious faith and values for America. The member of Congress telling a reporter to “f— off” is a self-described “Christian nationalist.” We’ve seen “Let’s Go Brandon”—a euphemism for a profanity that once would have resulted in church discipline—chanted in churches.
So, we’ve got the “Nones,” who freaked out the theocrats and the people who only did church so they could slap a theological justification on their intimations of superiority over others.
Then along came Trump as the embodiment of the faux-believer who barely even bothers to talk the talk, but promises power and vengeance and pandering, and all those folks swooned.
Since Trump is so obviously faking, he gets a total pass on all the “Christian” stuff, denuding 2000 years of theology and ethics of all content and meaning, tarnishing the “brand” as bullshit.
This frees the rank-and-file who never were all that churchy to claim a churchy label but do nothing else remotely Christian, in fact do a shit-ton of the polar opposite.
And it mainly hurts people trying to practice sincere and difficult Christianity, the kind that isn’t about sticking it to your political enemies and seizing power. Those folks are decent people, usually not bothering anyone, just wrestling with how to know and do the right things in the world. That’s hard enough without taking over a superpower in the name of some Mirror Universe Prince of Peace.
When Even Cheap Grace is Too Pricey
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was pretty much a badass. Antifa before antifa was cool, you could say. German theologian and pastor, dissident and fugitive from the Nazis, eventually sent to a concentration camp and hanged. His famous book, The Cost of Discipleship, gave us the famous concept of “cheap grace,” which is basically convenience Christianity, Christianity without any wrestling, any strictures, any demands, any borders on conduct (okay, I simplify, but Bonhoeffer was much more of a stickler than I care to be).
By contrast, “costly grace” entails integrity and consistency, saying No, accepting consequences for one’s beliefs and not changing them out like wardrobe backstage between scene changes. It entails defending your beliefs and the actions based on them in light of them. And it’s those costly entailments we are too busy or bored with or inconvenienced by or too cynical or too ignorant of to bother with.
I think of Bonhoeffer, and then I think of Martin Luther King Jr. going to jail for his beliefs and activism. I think of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Then I think of that cranky clerk who refused to grant wedding licenses to gay couples and pitched a self-righteous fit about it. I think of the Alliance Defending Freedom suing everybody on behalf of “oppressed” football coaches making spectacles of 50 yard line prayers or website makers who don’t make sites for gay weddings but feel persecuted because they wouldn’t if they ever were asked to, which they weren’t.
And if that’s what Christianity is and means, then cheap grace won. It means martyrs are long dead and gone and the paltry pretenders of today just piss on their graves when they try to cosplay as their heirs. And it means that the political cooptation of an evangelical/Christian identity as some aspect of Trumpism was accomplished because “Christian” came to mean anything and nothing long ago, and Trump just grabbed an opportunity.
The same is true, as Marcotte notes above, for patriotism and “law and order.” If American “patriotism” includes overthrowing the US Constitution, the concept has been utterly emptied of content. “Law and order” (apart from its racist origins) is supposed to mean accountability for breaking the law, not a surge in base popularity for your Party Leader every time he racks up another indictment.
We Recognize This in Kansas
What Trumpism has done to Christianity should be instantly recognizable in Kansas, because every year we see the same process transpire in our legislature. A bill written about one subject, addressing one problem or issue, sometimes gets…well, demonically possessed.
Someone takes the bill, which is officially “born” and procedurally “alive”—it exists, according to the rules—and switches out all of its contents, everything that made it about whatever it was originally about. They replace all that stuff with a totally different bill, either a brand new one or separate bill that’s been floating around but hasn’t gone anywhere. The bill number is the same, and because the number is what got passed and acted on so far, it’s still procedurally valid—doesn’t matter what its contents say. If, say, the state senate already passed the original form of the bill before the demon entered in, then the house passes the possessed version, everyone pretends…not to know about this.
The senate doesn’t say, “Hey waitaminnit. We gave you a bill to fund schools. You passed…what’s it say here? ‘Beelzebub is Lord.’ Are y’all high? Quit farting around and do some real work.”
Imagine your boss has you draft the quarterly report. You keep the headers, but replace the contents with your Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction and hand it in as if nothing about that was weird as hell. And your boss is cool with it! Submits it right up the chain!
Same with the Kansas legislature. Because there’s a whole procedural hassle involved in crying foul about this tactic. And because the legislature is on a clock to wrap up, and possession is easier to pull off when the victim is under stress, and exorcisms take time, and basically no one but nerdy reporters pay any attention, it happens a lot.
We call it “gut and go,” and it’s anti-democratic AF. And I bring it up because Trumpism represents the second Gut-and-Go of American Christianity in my lifetime.
The first gut-and-go, I submit, was the rise of the Religious Right in the 1970s and 80s, fueled by racial resentment, the taking up of abortion opposition by Protestants who previously had no thoroughgoing opposition to it, and what we came to call the “culture wars,” which are really “wars about who deserve to be treated as full human beings with equal dignity in our society” and not some dismissive distraction as a lot of pundits would tell you.
I’m not saying that Christianity was all milk and honey prior to that turn, that it was welcoming to LGBTQIA+ or that Sunday at noon wasn’t the most racially segregated hour in America. I am saying that things could have gone in a more humane direction for Christianity2 had it not been for Pat Robertson, The Moral Majority, Focus on the Family, and the alignment of right-wing religionists with the GOP in a full-out battle for political power and influence. They captured the public face of Christianity, emptied out as much of the competing messages of universal love and inclusion and non-discrimination as they could get away with, and weaponized it for the benefit of one political party.
What we see with Trumpism is a second gut-and-go, and maybe a far more effective one. Why fuss with starchy church clothes and rigid moral standards that frown on going to the bars and sleeping around and being an intolerant, raging dick to people you really hate deep down if you can just get by with (1) claiming an evangelical Christian or Catholic label, and (2) trying not to use the word “hate” at least on camera? All those Barstool Sports Christians secretly suspected the pious ones were hypocrites anyway, and now they’ve been given political cover (with endorsements by some of the most prominent evangelical voices in the country) to say they’re Christians without having to do any more than yell “Go Trump!” at some hapless libtard.
The needle to thread, for the theocrats backing Trump (and there are a lot of them), is how to instantiate Christian nationalism in ways that won’t affect the redhat convenience Christians, won’t catch their notice as their freedoms are truncated, won’t be blamed on theocratic maneuvers, and won’t require any more piety and practice from them except to act as reliable bullies of liberals in public spaces and repeat supporters at the ballot box. With all the media outlets catering to folks in this bubble, I think they have a really good shot.
This isn’t just the second gut-and-go of American Christianity I’ve seen in my life (both profiting the GOP), this is Trump’s second gut-and-go of an American institution in only a decade! His first, now fully accomplished, was the gut-and-go replacement of anything resembling the Republican party I knew up until 2016 with his MAGA movement of fascists of all stripes, scrambling for power and influence next to the would-be authoritarian. I’m not saying the GOP pre-Trump had redeeming qualities, but it had a residual capacity to feel shame or at least act like it felt shame. And shame is a mark of conscience, which is a sign of some sort of integrity or character, so even if a shameable GOP was mostly an act for the cameras, it still showed that hypocrisy was a compliment vice paid to virtue.
The normal term for this is “co-optation” or “capture.” It’s not new. In fact it’s the textbook way fascists and authoritarians rise to and achieve lasting power, pulling this Last of Us Cordyceps Zombie-Ant fungus trick of commandeering a big powerful vehicle and using it to drive them to the throne.
But I think gut-and-go is better because it conveys the behind-closed-door nature of it that is, at the same time, often perfectly legal (because we never acted boldly or early enough to plug such holes). It suggests how quickly and completely the takeover, the switcheroo, can be, how you can go to bed one night and wake up the next morning to find the world utterly changed, and yet everyone treats this as normal.
But mostly how absolutely lethal this all is to democracy.
I mean, you won’t find much in the Bible about putting kids in “time out,” or anything at all about pre-adolescent brain development. You will read about spoiling the child by sparing the rod. So it’s hard to claim that the James Dobson style of beating the shit out of your kids is a perversion of scripture. It’s just one of those instances where we managed to learn some stuff in the years since we raised herds of goats in the desert. That it contradicts the literal advice of the Bible and the “God is love” theme many subscribe to, is just unfortunate, I guess.
I think portions of it have gone in that more evolved, more humane direction. I know many practitioners of that kind of Christianity. For example—and extremely relevant to the news hook of this piece and the “cruelty is the point” capture of evangelicals by Trumpism—is this worship song, “Not A Weapon.” (You may need to download the MP3 file and play it that way. I did.) Written many, many years ago by some dear friends of mine, this may not be your jam, and it’s not really mine, either, but I remember listening to their album on repeat during a particularly lonely and rough time back when I was really trying to implant, or switch on, the God gene, and I’ll always be grateful to them for this assist in that effort, even if I’m a sucky old heathen Meh-theist despite their ministrations.